How the ‘Dark Matter of Work’ hinders productivity and profitability

Andrew Filev at Wrike describes how business leaders finding it difficult to stay on top of the proliferation of information, applications, projects, and meetings

From the number of platforms and applications we use, to the amount of information we process, the complexity of work has significantly increased. The shift to remote and hybrid working models has only intensified the situation, leaving many business leaders in the dark, with little to no visibility into the work that is being carried out across their organisation.

In fact, recent research from Wrike found that as much as half of all work is not visible to key stakeholders, with the effects being felt at every level. In the same way that CERN identified Dark Matter as the ‘invisible’ content that makes up 95% of the mass of the universe, the Dark Matter of Work represents activity and information that we cannot immediately see, but that has a powerful influence on everything around it.

This Dark Matter of Work is also having damaging effects on the workforce and on organisations. Employee burnout is at an all-time high, and businesses are losing up to $60M a year due to wasted time, delayed or cancelled projects, and staff churn. If uncontrolled, this is expected to increase by 53% in the next five years.

While we struggle to ‘see’ this Dark Matter, there are steps business leaders can take to identify where it exists and how to overcome it.

Information and application overload

Many of the challenges businesses are facing today have been brought about by the Digital Era, and leaders are finding it difficult to stay on top of the proliferation of information, applications, projects, and meetings that make up their workday.

As a result, Dark Matter has started living in synchronous applications and unstructured work. This includes instant message threads, video calls, emails, or in the gaps between systems and applications that aren’t integrated.

Without a single source of truth that can track, manage, action, and align all work goals across a business, there is a dangerously low level of visibility as to what work is actually being done, who it is being done by, and how it supports wider company goals or initiatives.

Unsurprisingly, this has led to workers and leaders being on completely different pages. Most organisational leads, for example, admit to only having visibility into 54% of the work their teams are doing, and cannot track the progress of much of that work in real time. And if we ask workers, they say employer visibility into their work is even lower (45%).

This suggests there may be more Dark Matter than we think.

Mired in meetings

With so much work flying under the radar, organisational productivity has naturally taken a hit. Duplicated efforts, application overload, and constant status check-ins across multiple platforms are not only causing delays and issues with projects but they’re also leading to increased employee burnout.

However, it’s important to remember that while the increased complexity of the digital age and hybrid working revolution has accelerated the growth of Dark Matter, it did not create it. It has existed in activities like unrecorded, in-person meetings for decades.

In fact, workers now spend an average of 2.79 hours a week in meetings, totalling more than 18 working days a year – many of these were reported as being unproductive, unplanned, and repetitive. 

Business leaders recognise that their employees spend too much time in meetings and want to reduce it, but they don’t know how. As a starting point, they should eliminate unnecessary or duplicate meetings and instead share that information in a more structured, documented way.

Finding light in a black hole

To avoid the growing complexity of work breeding more Dark Matter, business leaders must gain greater visibility into what work is being done across their organisation. 

As such, they need to focus on tools and technologies that help boost productivity and that can bring the concept of real-time enterprise to action, all through a single source of truth. This will make it easier to track work and access information, reducing wasted employee time and resulting in less risk of projects being delayed, cancelled, or not going to plan.

Enterprises need an approach that is robust enough to manage and orchestrate complex workflows, while also being simple enough for employees to use. And they need to recognise that a single task or project can travel across and beyond an organisation - from teams to the board, to partners, customers, or even suppliers.

If business leaders understand the Dark Matter of Work, then they can begin to identify possible signs of it in their own organisation. Only then can they truly understand its potential impact and take action to prevent it.

Failure to do so will not only lead to more hours of wasted time and work, but more extreme levels of financial and talent loss – something no business can afford. 

Andrew Filev is Founder and CEO at Wrike 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com